Updated - Really, what is it about the American south that delights in cold-blooded executions of innocent men?

Richard Glossip will join a long line of such victims of state murder on Wednesday at 3:00 p.m., barring a last minute reprieve from Governor Mary Fallin (R-Trash).

As for the distinguishing qualities of the south that delights in cold-blooded killing? Careerism, convenience and religion.

Police, prosecutors, judge and the rest of the murder machine will sleep well Wednesday and Thursday nights, no one can reach the indecent.

Now, if the Oklahoma City detectives who engineered this travesty are killed, I would have no problem. These people are human garbage.
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Oklahoma also has a for-profit prison, Cimarron Correctional Center that bills itself as "creative, flexible and adaptable," and operated by the publicly traded Corrections Corporation of America (CXW) on the New York Stock Exchange.

Plenty of more inmates where those four came from. Investors in CXW with the wrong position lost money. This is Oklahoma.
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The Innocence Project calls the Glossip killing tomorrow a "deadly mistake."

The office of the prosecutor is imbued in American society with the license to lie, as are the police. What is finally becoming clear is these people also have the license to kill, and they use this entitlement repeatedly.

"Richard Glossip was convicted of murder solely on the testimony of Justin Sneed, who confessed to committing the murder himself, but claimed Richard had hired him to do it. There is no evidence to support this claim—no DNA, no fingerprints, no other witnesses—just Sneed's word. By implicating Richard, Sneed avoided the death penalty and now is serving a life sentence in a medium-security prison," notes Susan Sarandon in a Move-on petition to help an attorney working pro bono.

Sneed's own daughter wrote to the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board last October to say that she "strongly believe[s]" Richard is innocent. "For a couple of years now, my father has been talking to me about recanting his original testimony," she wrote. She feels her father's conscience is "getting to him." (The Intercept)

The Innocence Project's Barry Scheck, Sen. Tom Coburn (U.S. Senator for Oklahoma from 2005-2015 and U.S. Representative for Oklahoma’s Second Congressional District from 1995-2001), Barry Switzer, Head Football Coach, The University of Oklahoma (1973-1988) John W. Raley, Jr., U.S. Attorney, Eastern District of Oklahoma (1990-1997) sent a letter to Oklahoma Gov. Fallin seeking a last-minute stay.

Dear Governor Mary Fallin:

We urge you to stay the execution of Richard Glossip so that deep concerns about his guilt can be addressed.

On September 16, unless you act, the State of Oklahoma will put Mr. Glossip to death for the murder of Barry Van Treese. Justin Sneed—who by his own admission beat Van Tresse to death with a baseball bat—will not meet that fate.

Why this stunning difference?

Sneed testified at Glossip’s trial and said that Glossip persuaded him to do the killing. In return, Sneed was allowed to plead guilty and avoid a death sentence. Sneed’s testimony is the only evidence that connects Glossip to this horrendous crime. There’s no DNA evidence, no other forensic or physical evidence, no other witnesses. Just Sneed’s word.

Did Sneed tell the truth? We don’t know, but we do know that he told many lies in this case because his story changed many times.

When he was first questioned by detectives, Sneed said he didn’t know anything about the murder. Then he said he didn’t kill Mr. Van Treese. Then he admitted that he did but said it was an accident, he only meant to rob him and knock him out. Then, after the detectives told him that they didn’t believe he acted alone, that they had Glossip in custody, and that it would be better for him if he gave them another name, Sneed finally said that Richard Glossip got him to kill Barry Van Treese. After getting what they were looking for, the police assured Sneed that this story would help him avoid the death penalty.

That last version led to a deal with the prosecution: Sneed—the admitted killer—testified against Glossip in exchange for a life sentence. As a result, Glossip faces death by lethal injection.

Why would anybody trust this testimony, given by a man like Sneed under the circumstances in which he gave it? But if Sneed was lying about Glossip’s involvement —as he unquestionably lied in his various contradictory statements—then Oklahoma is about to execute an innocent man.

The writers of this letter have a wide range of professional backgrounds and political perspectives. But we share a deep concern about the integrity of the criminal justice system in Oklahoma and throughout the United States. We are particularly concerned about the danger of executing an innocent man.

Could that really happen? In the United States, in 2015?

Yes, it could. It almost certainly has happened—the cases of Cameron Todd Willingham and Carlos Deluna in Texas are troubling examples—and it may well happen again, perhaps as soon as September 16.

The National Registry of Exonerations lists 115 defendants who were sentenced to death and later exonerated and released after new evidence of innocence was discovered. Of those 115 innocent defendants who had been sentenced to death, 29, a quarter of the total, were convicted after another person who was himself a suspect in the murder gave a confession that also implicated the innocent defendant.

Richards Glossip’s case is a classic example. Faced with the prospect of execution, anybody would be tempted to lie and shift the blame to someone else if that’s what it takes to stay alive. But Justin Sneed isn’t just anybody. He’s a man who beat another person to death for money and then lied about it to try to save his own skin.

Last year a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences estimated that 4.1 percent of defendants who are sentenced to death in the United States are innocent, one in 25 or more than 300 death-sentenced defendants since 1973. Most of them, like most of all defendants who are sentenced to death, have not been exonerated or executed. They remain in prison or have died of other causes.

But with that error rate among death sentences, there’s no doubt that we have put innocent people to death. We don’t know how many or who they all are, but it has happened.

We also don’t know for sure whether Richard Glossip is innocent or guilty. That is precisely the problem.

If we keep executing defendants in cases like this, where the evidence of guilt is tenuous and untrustworthy, we will keep killing innocent people.

Oklahoma has come close to executing innocent defendants. Ron Williamson’s story is well known from John Grisham’s book, The Innocent Man. He came within five days of execution. Fortunately, a federal judge ordered a new trial. Four years later Williamson was exonerated by DNA tests—which also identified the real killer, who was later convicted of the murder.

Most cases like this are weeded out by the courts, usually before a death sentence is ever imposed. That might have happened here if Glossip’s defense attorneys had made the problems in the case clear to the judge and jury, but they never did. As a result, a juror in Glossip’s first trial recently came forward and said, “I feel that this situation needs to be looked at and at the VERY least given a 60 days stay to make for certain that all the stones are unturned and everything is looked at with a fine tooth comb.”

Unfortunately, Governor, in this case you are the last state official with the power to prevent a deadly mistake.

Sincerely,

Sen. Tom Coburn (U.S. Senator for Oklahoma from 2005-2015 and U.S. Representative for Oklahoma’s Second Congressional District from 1995-2001)

Barry Switzer, Head Football Coach, The University of Oklahoma (1973-1988)

John W. Raley, Jr., U.S. Attorney, Eastern District of Oklahoma (1990-1997)

Barry Scheck, Co-Director of the Innocence Project

Samuel Gross, Professor of Law, University of Michigan and Editor, National Registry of Exonerations

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Scariest 14 Words in Politics

I'm from the Republican Party and I'm here to save Social Security and Medicare.

Social Security and Medicare Targeted by Paul Ryan and his Ayn Rand-worshipping Colleagues

"I left as an act of rational self-interest. Having gutted private-sector pensions and health benefits as a result of their embrace of outsourcing, union busting and 'shareholder value' the GOP now thinks it is only fair that public-sector workers give up their pensions and benefits, too. Hence the intensification of the GOP's decades-long campaign of scorn against government workers. Under the circumstances, it is simply safer to be a current retiree rather than a prospective one. If you think Paul Ryan and his Ayn Rand-worshipping colleagues aren't after your Social Security and Medicare, I am here to disabuse you of your naiveté. They will move heaven and earth to force through tax cuts that will so starve the government of revenue that they will be 'forced' to make 'hard choices' - and that doesn't mean repealing those very same tax cuts, it means cutting the benefits for which you worked."

Trump's dog whistles to racists including white municipal police continue. From August 2016 in West Bend, Wisconsin, as reported by Yamiche Alcindor in the New York Times:

Jack Beck, 65, a retired bricklayer who lives in West Bend, said he planned to vote for Mr. Trump.

"Every night in Milwaukee, there is someone being shot, and they make nothing of that until a cop is involved, and then all of a sudden it’s always blamed on the cop," said Mr. Beck, who added that he hoped West Bend’s black population would not increase. He tied much of the unrest in Milwaukee to his belief that black residents do not want to work hard and instead want to use police killings to get handouts from the government.
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"You do not preach and encourage hatred for the Negro and hope to restrict it to that field. It is an old, old story. It is one repeated over and over again in history. When the wolves of hate are loosed on one people, then no one is safe."— Ralph McGillAtlanta Constitution, Oct. 13, 1958A Church, A School

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Spotting Political Prosecutions

Alex Kozinski on liberty

"The right to do what the law does not prohibit, without fear of harassment or punishment, is one of the hallmarks of a free society." — Judge Alex Kozinski, Chief Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (Foreword in Sidney Powell's Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice (Brown Books Publishing Group, 2014))

Wisconsin Misconduct in Public Office

SCR 946.12(3). Misconduct in public office. Any public officer or public employee who does any of the following is guilty of a Class I felony. See link above.

Class-action, civil rights suit against Milwaukee

"For almost a decade, the Milwaukee Police Department has pursued an aggressive and unconstitutional policing strategy promoting large numbers of stops and frisks citywide. Between 2007 and 2015, the department almost tripled their traffic and pedestrian stops, from around 66,000 to around 196,000, following the launch of the program in 2008."

Milwaukee residents have long protested that police officers are conducting stops and frisks of innocent people, and particularly treating people of color as suspects for no good reason, stopping innocent men, women, and children as they try to go about their daily lives. The department conducts far more stops and frisks in the parts of Milwaukee that are predominantly Black or Latino than in other areas."- From the ACLU

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"When conservatives like [Robert] Bork treat rights as islands surrounded by a sea of government powers, they precisely reverse the view of the Founders as enshrined in the Constitution, wherein government powers are limited and specified and rendered as islands surrounded by a sea of individual rights."- Stephen Macedo. The New Right v. the Constitution (Washington: Cato Institute, 1987)

On being police

Scott Walker—Frontman for Rightwingers

"The simplest way I can tell you is we had total and complete unity between the state party, quite frankly, Americans for Prosperity, the Tea Party groups, the Grandsons of Liberty. The [Glenn Beck-instigated] 9/12ers were involved. It was a total and complete agreement that nobody cared who got the credit, that everyone was going to run down the tracks together..." ...

The Strike — The Improbable Story of an Iconic 1886 Painting of Labor Protest

James M. Dennis, professor emeritus of art history at the University of Wisconsin–Madison

President Theodore Roosevelt on Veterans

Republicans are after veterans' benefits: "A man who is good enough to shed his blood for his country is good enough to be given a square deal afterwards. More than that no man is entitled, and less than that no man shall have." - President Theodore Roosevelt. Speech to veterans, Springfield, IL, July 4, 1903

On the Fourth Amendment, back in 1972

"The price of lawful public dissent must not be a dread of subjection to an unchecked surveillance power. Nor must the fear of unauthorized official eavesdropping deter vigorous citizen dissent and discussion of Government action in private conversation."
- Justice Lewis Franklin Powell, Jr., writing for unanimous court in: United States v. United States District Court, 407 U.S. 297 (1972)

Fourth Amendment

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

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Bertrand Russell

"Those whose lives are fruitful to themselves, to their friends, or to the world are inspired by hope and sustained by joy: they see in imagination the things that might be and the way in which they are to be brought into existence. In their private relations they are not pre-occupied with anxiety lest they should lose such affection and respect as they receive: they are engaged in giving affection and respect freely, and the reward comes of itself without their seeking. In their work they are not haunted by jealousy of competitors, but concerned with the actual matter that has to be done. In politics, they do not spend time and passion defending unjust privileges of their class or nation, but they aim at making the world as a whole happier, less cruel, less full of conflict between rival creeds, and more full of human beings whose growth has not been dwarfed and stunted by oppression."

U.S. Supreme Court Decision - Michigan Dept of State Police v. Sitz

Michael Leon

Michael Leon is a writer living in Madison, Wisconsin. His reporting has been recognized by the Wisconsin Newspaper Association. Leon's writing has appeared nationally in The Progressive, The Advocate, In These Times, CounterPunch and The Champion—the journal of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and locally in the Isthmus, the Capital Times and the Fitchburg Star. Leon works as a writer, editor, veterans' advocate, and public relations consultant.